On 14 December 2010, I participated in a massive demonstration in Rome against the university reform, in the occasion of the vote of confidence towards the Berlusconi government in the senate. After the news that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had unexpectedly managed to obtain the majority (convincing some of the senators who had split from the party in previous weeks to returnâwith arguments that are still under investigation by the judiciary system), the demonstration escalated into limited but violent clashes with the police that guarded the âred zoneâ of the city centre. At the end of the demonstration, a friend and fellow activist showed me the webpage of La Repubblica (Italyâs most importantâtraditionally progressiveânewspaper) on his smartphone: the headline can be translated as something like âGuerrillas in Rome. Itâs the new 1977â, a clear reference to a year that was characterised by radical and sometimes violent protests that, as we will see, have often been connected, in the Italian public memory, to terrorism.
A few days later, I received a phone call from a local newspaper in Padua, the seat of the university from which I had graduated two years earlier, telling me that somebody had recognised me on a news programme and that they wanted to quote me in an article about the participation of Paduan students in the demonstration. âOf courseâ, I answered, âwho else will you interview?â When I heard the names, I was stunned. Their choices, to report on an event involving thousands of young men and women born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, were Luca Casarini, a 43-year-old veteran of the Venetian social centres, mostly famous for his role during the anti-G8 protest in Genoa in 2001, and Pietro Calogero, a 71-year-old retired public prosecutor, who, in 1979, ordered the arrest of Toni Negri and other leaders of Autonomia Operaia, charging a significant number of the most radical activists of the 1977 protests with terrorism and armed insurrection. The chance to explain the studentsâ critique of the university reform or the activistsâ point of view on what happened in the streets and in the parliament clearly did not exist. The main issue, once again, was the return of the violence and terrorism of the 1970s, implying a seamless continuity between the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978 and the (almost completely non-violent) protests against the âGelmini reformâ in 2010.
This anecdote is just one from a long list of personal experiences that drive my interest in the peculiar relationship between social movements and collective memories. Studying in Padua, a city in which the 30th anniversary of the arrests of 1979 was marked by competing books, events, and commemorations by different political actors with conflicting interpretations of those stories, certainly played a role. But the presence of the past, and in particular of the cumbersome memory of the 1960s and 1970s, is something that everyone who participates in collective action in Italy has to face, sooner or later.
In this book, I try to come to terms with this presence through the tools of social science. In particular, I aim at illuminating some of the most relevant aspects of the relationship between social movements and collective memories, using concepts and analytical instruments of the different fields, in the attempt to help broaden the scholarship and contribute to the social knowledge of these phenomena.
In fact, the social and scholarly relevance of the relationship between movements and memories is deeply intertwined. The media depictions of the most relevant episodes of protest of the last few years, of which the superficial grouping of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the European anti-austerity mobilisations is the most visible example, tend to flatten out in the present, losing the perspective of historical trajectories, evolving genealogies, and cultural continuities. A rhetoric of newness, spontaneity, and techno-enthusiasm, describing unorganised and unpoliticised masses of individuals that are threatening the global political and economic order thanks to their easy access to social media on their mobile phones, has been dominating the public discourse on the most recent episodes of mobilisation. This is thwarting our ability to really understand such complex and long-term processes. These narratives, other than being potentially misleading for researchers, tend to âunwittingly (or not) deny agency to social movement networks and actorsâ (Flesher Fominaya, 2015), thus favouring a depoliticised and confused representation of collective action, which is easy to exploit for those actors interested in doing so.
Similar concerns also characterise the recent academic debate on social movements. In fact, the goal of accounting for agency, giving back to movement actors the keys of their action, has been one of the core issues in social movement studies in the last ten years. In particular, the focus on strategic choices and on the symbolic and cultural factors influencing them and shaping the environment in which they are made has been one of the major approaches among social researchers in the attempt to bridge the divide between structure and agency and to investigate these relationships in a dynamic way. This collective enterprise aims to account for the role of actors, their composition, their choices, and their backgrounds, in a complex environment in which discursive and symbolic traits are being increasingly investigated, as well as the processes that shape them.
It is in this context, in particular through the widespread interest in the construction of collective identities and the symbolic dimension of collective action, that collective memory entered the study of social movements. Since the so-called cultural turn of social movement studies, the interest towards collective memory and, in particular, its relationship with political contention has been steadily growing among scholars working on cases of participation and conflict. In the last few years, memory studies, and in particular the sociology of memory based on the seminal work of Maurice Halbwachs, have become a fundamental tool for the development of research on social movements. In particular, the literature on memory has proved increasingly able to provide useful insights into the symbolic construction of the reality in which collective action takes place, interpreting memory not as a mere mirror of past events but as the result of collective practices that are able to offer insights into current ways of interpreting reality. On the other hand, the scholarship on memory has increasingly interiorised pluralistic, dynamic, and contentious models and explanations, evolving from the approach rooted in the Durkheimian tradition towards a âsociology of mnemonic practicesâ (Olick & Robbins, 1998). My familiarity with this line of work, and in particular with the study of the effect of mediatisation on mnemonic processes,1 pushed me to try to apply and rethink these models in terms of their relationship with a dynamic and contentious field, such as that of social movements.
The aim of this work is twofold: on the one hand, I will analyse the representation of contentious pasts in the public memory, identifying actors, processes, and changes; and on the other hand, I will assess the influence of these representations on contemporary mobilisation, in particular on the strategic choices of contemporary activists in the context of the student movements that have animated Italy and Spain in the last few years.
Cultural factors play a role in structuring the symbolic environment in which contentious politics take place. Among these factors, collective memories are particularly relevant: memory can help collective action by drawing on symbolic material from the past, but at the same time it can constrain peopleâs ability to mobilise, by imposing proscriptions and prescriptions. The goal of this book is to analyse the relationship between social movements and collective memories and, in particular to answer two main research questions: how do current activists remember the past, in terms of forms, content, and sources? And how does the memory of the past influence strategic choices of current activists?
To answer these questions, I focus on the student movement in Italy and Spain and analyse the content and format of media sources in order to map out the different representations of a contentious past. Qualitative interviews to activists allow me to investigate the influence of these representations on contemporary mobilisations. In particular, I focus on the evolution of the representation of specific events in the Italian and Spanish student movements of the 1960s and 1970s in different public fields, identifying the role of terrorism and political transitions in shaping the present publicly discussed image of the past. The book draws on a qualitative content analysis of media material, tracing the phases of commemoration, putting it in historical context, and aiming at reconstructing the different mechanisms of contentious remembrance. Furthermore, I refer to interviews with contemporary student activists, assessing the relationship between the public memory of a contentious past and the strategic choices of contemporary movements. The main idea behind this research design is to identify the main representations of the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the media and then to compare them with the representations of the past shared by current student activists. This allows me to analyse analogies and differences between media representations and activistsâ memories and, thus, to assess the impact of the media in the construction of the memory of the 1960s and 1970s in current social movements. Furthermore, I use interviews to activists to identify occasions in which symbolic references to the past play a role in shaping the strategic choices of the movement.
The first research question, on the forms, contents, and sources of the memories of the past shared by current activists, is answered through two subquestions: which narratives of the past ha...